How the French Saved America

by Tom Shachtman

  Not yet, Duportail pleaded, basing his request on a Washington letter that he hand-delivered to de Grasse and likely translated for him on the spot. Washington begged the admiral not only to wait for his and Rochambeau’s arrival before attacking Cornwallis but to detach ships upriver to bring the American and French troops to the Yorktown Peninsula. “I have not hesitated to open my heart to [Duportail] and acquaint him with all my resources and my orders,” de Grasse wrote back, and expressed willingness to wait for a general “whose experience in the profession of arms, knowledge of the country and insight will greatly augment our resources,” but protested that his short time in American waters made it unfeasible to use for transport the vessels needed to block Cornwallis’s supply ships. “Come with the greatest expedition,” Duportail urged Washington in his own letter. “Let us make us[e] of the short stay of the count de grasse here. we have no choice left I thinck, when 27 of line are in Chesapeake, when great americain and French forces are joined we must take Cornwallis or be all dishonored.”

  Duportail also wanted Washington to hurry because he feared that de Grasse might flatter Lafayette into an immediate attack. De Grasse did try, telling Lafayette, “I want to contribute everything I can to further your glory and assure you of spending a winter of tranquility [after vanquishing Cornwallis].… With pleasure, I join your admirers.” Lafayette resisted the pressure.

  In midmorning on September 5, offloading was continuing when the scout frigate Aigrette signaled a press of sail arriving from the north. De Grasse hoped it was Barras, but as the number of vessels grew, the Aigrette soon signaled that it was the British, with so many ships that de Grasse concluded that both Hood’s and Graves’s squadrons had come after him.

  He wanted to sail out in force to meet them. But to do so he had to wait until the Chesapeake Bay tide turned to ebb. The French exit of Chesapeake Bay began at 11:30 a.m., with Bougainville’s flagship leading the vanguard. Although the fleet was anchored in proper three-column formation, it still took several hours for all the ships to exit the relatively narrow channel, which they had to do one by one, and even then de Grasse had to leave behind the four warships positioned to block Cornwallis, along with the eighteen hundred sailors and ninety officers who had been offloading troops. Thus de Grasse’s fleet for this action off the Virginia Capes was smaller than it had been, and shorthanded; and he faced a formidable enemy, in attack formation, that had the weather gage.

  * * *

  At that very same hour, Rochambeau and his retinue were floating down the Delaware River from Philadelphia toward Head of Elk. They had passed Forts Mercer and Mifflin and other important sites of the war. Washington and his retinue had set off overland to meet them at Head of Elk; the commander loved to ride his steed and did not much like being on a boat. As the French approached the town of Chester they saw on the bank an American officer waving wildly at them with a hat in one hand and a white handkerchief in the other. Nearing, they realized it was Washington. “I never saw a man so thoroughly and openly delighted,” Lauzun recalled. What happened next amazed everyone. Washington, upon conveying to Rochambeau that de Grasse had made Chesapeake Bay, enveloped Rochambeau in a full-body embrace. Each general, Closen observed, had reason to be ecstatic, as did the young officers, “burning with the desire to try their strength against the enemy and avid for gloire, as we all were.” There was a sense of everything coming together at last, of a moment to be savored for its melding of American and French hearts and wills in an ultimate conjoint endeavor.

  * * *

  The British fleet facing de Grasse’s was not in as good shape as it first appeared to the spyglasses of the French. When Hood had reached Sandy Hook, he had been insistent on leaving immediately to counter de Grasse, but Graves protested that his New York fleet was not ready to go. His ships were in poor repair and to obtain four hundred able bodies press-gangs had recently had to roust men from their beds. After taking three days to ready his vessels, Graves still left behind five capital ships—and Hood was appalled. At sea it was Graves’s turn to be annoyed, as Hood’s vessels were “the shadow of ships more than substance,” slowing the fleet to three knots per hour. The nineteen ships of the line included only three recent additions, a tenth of the ships the Admiralty had retained in European waters to counter French and Spanish initiatives in the Mediterranean and Dutch ones in the North Sea. By deciding to keep the bulk of British ships in European waters in 1781, a naval historian writes, “The Admiralty had finally sacrificed the parity in naval strength on which the safety of the scattered British army [in America] depended.”

  At the start of the Battle of the Virginia Capes, in the early afternoon of September 5, 1781, the British fleet was three miles north of the French, “in a position almost beyond the wildest dreams of a sea-commander,” a naval analyst later wrote, since Graves’s “whole fleet was running down before the wind and his enemy was … working slowly out of harbor. He had only to fall on their van with full force and the day was his.” But standard Admiralty fighting orders decreed that attacking ships had to be in line-ahead formation, a maneuver that took Graves ninety minutes to achieve and that allowed the French to get wholly out of the bay. Only at 3:46 p.m. did Graves give the signal to engage, and shortly issued a different order, with the result that only some British ships, rather than the whole line, were positioned properly.

  Both sides then began to blast away.

  “Thunder, foam and fire,” Bougainville wrote of that day; “Those few testing moments for which an entire naval officer’s life has been built and for which so many arms have toiled, so much sweat has been poured out in the shipyards to get together all that timber, that iron, those sails.” The foretop bowline of his ship was twice shot off, and sailors repairing it were killed by enemy fire. But his Auguste, while taking sixty-seven casualties, managed to riddle the British Terrible and nearly sank it. The Auguste also put three other British ships out of action.

  After ninety minutes had gone by and Graves saw that the French were continuing to advance, he signaled his ships to cease the attack and sail away. By 6:30 p.m. the firing ended for the day. The British ships had suffered more than the French ones, although the French had lost more men. Bougainville had gained new respect for de Grasse, with whom he had been feuding, and de Grasse lauded him, saying, “That’s what I call fighting.” On the British side, Hood became enraged at Graves’s missed opportunities, although analysts also later faulted Hood for dilatoriness in carrying out the commander’s orders.

  Through the night the two fleets drifted southeast, in parallel. The morning revealed that the French ships were less damaged than the British. The wind remained negligible, making it impossible for either side to do more than maintain relative positions. On the third day rainsqualls and a British wish to avoid action and complete repairs also resulted in no skirmishes. French naval corporal Simon Pouzoulet marveled in his diary at his commanders’ dexterity in maneuvering for the weather gage, and regretted his ship’s not being close enough to the British to send cannon shot at them. Early on September 8 Graves gave orders to sail to the windward of the French and be ready to attack, but was only able to use the weather gage for a short period, as de Grasse by well-executed maneuvers made Graves cede it. Even so, very little fighting ensued. Another night passed. The next morning, September 9, de Grasse’s men spotted a fleet on the horizon and, thinking it was the British, gave chase. They never caught it, but Graves chased de Grasse, and by day’s end both fleets were nearer to Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, than to Cape Henry, Virginia. That allowed the unknown fleet, which was Barras’s, to slip unopposed into the Chesapeake Bay anchorage.

  Barras managed this partly because the British did not expect him—they presumed he had already combined with de Grasse and was not sailing independently—but mostly due to his own initiative. With the craftiness imbued in him by a long career in the French navy, where preservation of assets was always highly regarded, and knowing that he carried pr
ecious cargo, to avoid encountering the British Barras had chosen a circuitous route. From Newport he sailed east around Long Island, and then due south until he reached a position lateral to Chesapeake Bay, where he turned sharply west and by rapid sailing made it into Chesapeake Bay unopposed. Upon arrival he immediately offloaded the heavy artillery, provisions, and troops from Newport.

  Thus, before shots were fired on land at Yorktown, the two French admirals, de Grasse and Barras, had immensely assisted their army brethren’s pursuit of the common objective, the defeat of Cornwallis’s army.

  Washington was then in Baltimore, unaware that there had already been a decisive Battle of the Virginia Capes, and also ignorant that Barras had invested the bay. That evening he rode the sixty miles to Mount Vernon, alone but for his personal servant and one aide. He had not been home since May 4, 1775. The next morning he wrote to Lafayette, “I hope you will keep Lord Cornwallis safe, without provisions or forage, until we arrive.”

  De Grasse was on his way to the Chesapeake to do just that, having reasoned that the British might lay off the sea action and try to beat him into the anchorage, and not knowing that Barras was already there. A modern French admiral writes that in the seminal Virginia Capes sea battle, while de Grasse was not as aggressive as a Suffren or a Rodney might have been, “la prudence et le sang-froid” (prudence and coolness under fire) had produced the essential victory—complete control of Chesapeake Bay.

  Upon de Grasse’s arrival in the bay, Barras, although more senior and entitled to command, graciously yielded it. Appreciative of the gesture, de Grasse quickly did what Washington had wanted but that he had not earlier felt able to oblige: sent ships to fetch French and American troops and matériel, using Barras’s transports and some captured British ones that were able to operate in shallow waters.

  The Battle of the Virginia Capes concluded when a Graves reconnaissance frigate reported that the French were all over Chesapeake Bay. The British commanders then agreed, as Graves wrote to London, that due to the enemy’s superior position, the poor condition of the British ships, the impending hurricane season, “and the impracticability of giving any effectual succour to General Earl Cornwallis,” they must return to New York and refit. With some luck they would return before Cornwallis was starved out and forced to surrender.

  * * *

  The French victory in the sea battle was not yet known at Williamsburg when Lafayette rode in at a gallop, dismounted, “hugged [Washington] as close as it was possible, and absolutely kissed him from ear to ear … with as much ardour as ever an absent lover kissed his mistress on his return,” wrote the lawyer St.-George Tucker, who stood no more than six feet from the general. Lafayette and Washington were celebrating what was already old news, that de Grasse had arrived, and both believed him to be still at sea, fighting the British. Washington was so worried about the outcome of the sea battle that he had sent word to the Continental and French armies to halt in place, pending further news. That evening, while Washington was a guest of Saint-Simon’s, news of the sea victory arrived, and he wrote to de Grasse, “felicitating your Excellency on the Glory of having driven the British Fleet from the Coast.” On September 17, Washington, Rochambeau, and their retinues sailed out on a captured ship to meet de Grasse on the flower-bedecked Ville de Paris. Here Washington had his third passionate embrace of the fortnight, with de Grasse, replete with the requisite triple kissing of right, left, and right cheeks. De Grasse chortled and addressed Washington as “mon cher petit général,” although the two of them were the same size, about six foot two, and taller than Rochambeau, whose many wounds caused him to stoop.

  Washington had brought with him Lafayette, Duportail, Knox, and Chastellux, as well as Benjamin Harrison, slated to become Virginia’s next governor. As with many of the Virginia signers of the Declaration of Independence, Harrison had had his property burned by Benedict Arnold, to the point of having all images of the signers and their families deliberately destroyed. Even Banastre Tarleton had not been so vicious in his raids.

  The celebration on the Ville de Paris was enlivened by a sense of impending action, as the senior allied commanders knew that they could not simply wait out Cornwallis—they would have to force matters. The British were ensconced at a narrow place in York River, in two strongholds on opposite sides, Yorktown and Gloucester. From those points they could shell attacking French ships with land cannons and from the ships that Cornwallis had positioned upriver. Command of that river to the west also gave him escape routes.

  What most worried Washington and Rochambeau, however, was not an attempted escape but that Cornwallis might hold out past the day when de Grasse had to sail for the West Indies. “The season is approaching when, against my will, I shall be obliged to forsake the allies for whom I have done my very best and more than could be expected,” de Grasse once again warned. While he agreed in writing to extend his and Saint-Simon’s stay beyond his October 15 deadline, he insisted that on November 1 he would have to sail, whether or not Cornwallis had surrendered. Washington, in response to this possibility, eloquently summed up the stakes:

  The measures which we we are now pursuing, are big with great events; the Peace and Independence of this Country, and the general tranquility of Europe will, it is more than probable, result from our Compleat success, disgrace to ourselves, Triumph to the Enemy, and probable Ruin to the American Cause, will follow our disappointment. The first is certain, if the powerful Fleet, now in Chesapeak Bay … can remain to the close of a regular operation, which, from various unforeseen causes, may be protracted beyond our present expectation, The second is much to be apprehended, if from the Fear of loosing the Aid of the Fleet, the operations by Land are precipitated faster than a necessary prudence & regard to the lives of Men, will warrant—the first may be slow, but sure, the second must be bloody & precarious.

  The next five days were a blur of bad weather. Washington and Rochambeau’s trip back to Williamsburg was so beset by wind and rain that it took until September 22. At 11:00 p.m. on the twenty-first, de Grasse was alerted that the British were going to send fireships—ships deliberately set ablaze for the purpose of burning the enemy’s—from upriver at 2:00 a.m. “In the dark night, it was a beautiful and at the same time devastating sight to observe five burning ships under full sail floating down the stream past our eyes,” a naval lieutenant noted. Only by dint of good maneuvering and timely rain was de Grasse’s fleet able to avoid extensive damage.

  That evening at Williamsburg Washington and Rochambeau received word that British admiral Robert Digby was expected in New York momentarily with three more ships of the line, and would set out soon with Hood for the Chesapeake. Closen, sent to the Ville de Paris with this news, reported in his diary that it “alarmed and disquieted these excitable gentlemen of the navy, who think only of cruises and battles and do not like to oblige or to cooperate with the land troops.” De Grasse wrote to Washington that it would be “imprudent of me to take a position from which it would be impossible to counter such forces,” and so proposed moving some ships out of the bay to fight the British fleet and leaving others to protect the armies.

  “I cannot conceal from Your Excellency the painful anxiety under which I have labored” since receiving his letter, Washington responded. Contending that the outcome of the coming campaign “is as certain as any Military operation can be rendered by a decisive superiority of strength and means—that it is in fact reducible to calculation,” he charged that anything that allowed Cornwallis an escape route or a chance of resupply, such as de Grasse leaving the Bay,

  would frustrate these brilliant prospects—and the consequence would be not only the disgrace & loss of renouncing an enterprise upon which the fairest expectations of the Allies have been founded—after the most expensive preparations and uncommon exertions & fatigues—but the disbanding perhaps the whole Army for want of provisions.… If the present opportunity shd be missed … no future day can restore us a similar occasion—for stri
king a decisive blow … and that the epoch of an honorable Peace will be more remote than ever.

  To emphasize this message Washington sent it with Lafayette, who was still recovering from a fever that had left him shaking. Rochambeau, also apprised of the potential move out of the bay, similarly sent de Grasse a plea against it. These emissaries, along with judicious reflection and the refusal of his captains to abandon the bay, brought the admiral to the conclusion that he ought not to chase phantoms.

  “You are the most amiable admiral that I know,” Rochambeau congratulated de Grasse on the decision: “You meet all of our wishes and I believe we are going to do good work.” But thereafter, every day, Rochambeau sent an aide to the edge of the York River to report on whether the de Grasse fleet remained in position. Washington’s heartfelt thank-you to de Grasse—“A great Mind knows how to make personal sacrifices to secure an important general Good”—was followed by his order to the armies to start the march to Yorktown at five the next morning.

  The watchword of the day was “Virginia,” and the countersigns “York” and “Gloucester” as the troops marched from Williamsburg thirteen miles to the vicinity of Yorktown. There the Americans would array on the right and the French on the left, but the manner in which they would be used in the siege would be up to Rochambeau, Washington acknowledging that the French general was far more expert at sieges, having been involved in fourteen earlier ones. Washington would not get in the way of the French using their expertise and their desire for gloire, understanding that any victory at Yorktown would ultimately be America’s, and his.

  For the French the siege of Yorktown was a fairly ordinary military task, neither very large nor terribly complex. At the same moment, some forty thousand French and Spanish troops, and fifty of France and Spain’s warships, were conducting a long-term siege of Gibraltar. At Yorktown, Rochambeau had the requisite supplies for entrenching and cannonading, a sufficiently large workforce, the cooperation of a naval squadron, and as a target a fortified town rather than a fortress. To help his American partners understand siege operations, Rochambeau distributed to them, in translation, Vauban’s fifty-two principles for conducting sieges, adapted from his Traité de l’attaque des places of 1703.